The eternal sunshine of the socialist mind

Since aWol turned me into a blogging radical with his pompous, absurd speeches after 9/11, one of my favorite sources for news and opinion has been the World Socialist Web Site. Their well-written and frequently lengthy articles continually expose the crimes of the Bushies and their accomplices in both major parties (and their corporate paymasters). Still, while neither fully supporting nor denying their standard conclusion, I am usually amused by it. The standard conclusion is usually along these lines: "This latest action demonstrates the total moral bankruptcy of the capitalist system and makes it clear that the only solution will come from an international mass movement of the working classes."

Today's article on aWol's attack Friday on the Democrats for going along with his Iraq lies fits the category:

The awakening of millions of people in the US to the lies they were told to justify the war in Iraq is creating the political conditions for the emergence of a genuine mass base for a movement against this war and the capitalist system that gave rise to it.

I hope they're right, but I must say that four years of BS and dashed hopes make it hard for me to share their optimism.

Nevertheless, today's article, as usual, makes some great points. Here are some excerpts:

The Democratic Party was complicit. It knew Bush was lying and went along with the administration’s war policy. This was based on the cowardly—and woefully misguided—political calculations that it could best fight the 2002 midterm election by bowing to the Republican right on the war and campaigning solely on economic issues. It was also, however, a matter of the war against Iraq being a consensus policy within the American financial elite that controls both parties.

The decision was taken that US could use its overwhelming military force to conquer Iraq, which possesses the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and thereby advance its geo-strategic position both in the Middle East and internationally. Unable to publicly defend a war waged for such naked class interests, the political establishment as a whole embraced the fraud of Iraqi WMD.
...
But the administration’s problem is not with the Democrats. Rather, it is with the American people, which has a well-earned distrust of both major parties. It is not a matter of what the Democratic politicians knew and were told, but what the masses of working people in the US knew and were told. Both parties deliberately deceived them in order to get the war the ruling elite wanted.

In the face of this mass opposition, Bush delivered a speech that consisted not of arguments meant to convince anyone, but rather of rhetoric intended to intimidate all those questioning the administration’s policy.

“These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will,” he declared. “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that our elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory.”

Bush’s remarks—a large portion of them having been lifted verbatim from the speech he delivered last month to the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute—were also intended for his extreme right-wing base.

Recycled here is the old “stab-in-the-back” theme, a staple of extreme right-wing politics going back to Adolf Hitler. The conception is that the troops are prepared to fight to victory, but they are being held back and betrayed by craven politicians at home. The logic of such denunciations is that all opposition to the war should be suppressed and those who persist arrested.
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The Bush administration and its Democratic accomplices have emerged as the recruiting sergeants for Islamist terrorism and are ultimately responsible for whatever horrors it unleashes.